21st century
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has just one basic set: it changes from Act One to Act Two by removing two evocative visual elements (a hearth and a panel of generally rustic appearance) and replacing them with geometrical and electrically dazzling shapes, and it has a binary contrast of costumes – ragged rebel Highlanders and sophisticated, techno-style royal loyalists.So, from the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in New York City, in an upscale loft apartment, with that absence of stuff that speaks of a power to acquire anything. There are paintings on the walls, but we see only their descriptions: we learn that the owner (curator, in his word) really only sees the descriptions, too, and that the aesthetic and artistic elements barely register. The maid has been given the evening off – it’s soon obvious why – and an art dealer flits about nervously waiting for his client to arrive with a view toward arranging a significant purchase. The artist is Black; everyone else, indeed, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for her, too, in a sense: as a former student at Chetham’s School of Music she’s an old friend of the Collective’s leader and artistic director, Rakhi Singh.Ruby Hughes and the Collective created a moving and stimulating online streamed programme from the Lakeside Arts venue at the University of Nottingham in February last year – Dowland, Debussy, Mahler Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Porcupine Tree’s members have said they don’t know if their 11th album and this autumn’s North American–European tour will conclude their 35-year career. If it does, it would be typical of the progressive rock trio – as averse to standing still as King Crimson – if they bowed out with a record that doesn't suggest a grand finale. As its title hints, Closure/Continuation sounds like a work in progress.Less dependent on singer-guitarist (and here bassist) Steven Wilson’s compositions than its predecessors, the project was jammed into life by him and drummer Gavin Harrison, and composed with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Nick Cave has always been a spoken-word man, and these seven short poems set to music with regular collaborator Warren Ellis are the latest in a genre he explores with exceptional talent. He is an artist driven by a need to create, constantly and in many forms, from concept albums to collage, and from drawing and song-writing to shamanic stage performances.This latest excursion was written over seven days in lockdown and recorded at the tail-end of a more conventional studio session. These are short texts, prayers to a God who is as wrathful as he is a saviour. The psalms invoke the deity Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Cornelia Parker’s early installations are as fresh and as thought provoking as when they were made. Her Tate Britain retrospective opens with Thirty Pieces of Silver (pictured below left: Detail). It’s more than 30 years since she ran over a collection of silver plate with a steamroller, then suspended the flattened objects on strings so they hang in silver pools a few inches above the floor. The familiar shapes are like place settings or wedding gifts whose tawdry glamour has been crushed along with the dreams of grandeur which they embody.Since Parker is a conceptual artist as much as a Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.It’s a only just more than a decent collection, with a few moments of glory, not least a rocking and rolling version of the classic “You Got to Move”, but there's something a little too efficient rather than ecstatic about it, even if Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We all make history, one way or another.” But some of us make more history than others, and a group of 27 English schoolboys who got lost in Southern Germany in 1936 haven’t made much, unfortunately. Scottish playwright Pamela Carter has brushed the cobwebs from this strange corner of Anglo-German relations and spun an irreverent new play about what it means to be English. Our narrators are three pupils of the Strand School in South London: rambunctious Eaton (Vinnie Heaven), clean-cut Harrison (Hubert Burton), and earnest Lyons (Matthew Tennyson), the youngest. They’re on a walking Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as Sørensen explained from the stage – standing next to Esfahani’s gleaming black harpsichord – two further anecdotes explain the name. It’s borrowed from a range of French womenswear, seen in a Copenhagen shop: the audience laughed.But it’s also derived from a mis-spelling on the manuscript of JS Bach’s six partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Incanting, declaiming, and growling, as if actual singing might prettify the Fontaines DC’s post-punk dirges, Grian Chatten has never sounded more aggrieved than he does on the Irish combo’s third album. Disarmingly, he also sounds younger on Skinty Fia than he did on the group’s brash debut, Dogrel (2019), and its startlingly seasoned follow-up, A Hero’s Death (2020). It’s as if the man can no longer shield the boy. There’s a logical reason for this, and it applies not just to the frontman but to the Fontaines as a collective and the places they find themselves in, musically Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Following the much-maligned Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), the third film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe stars Jared Leto as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr Michael Morbius. Suffering from a rare blood condition that threatens to take his life, Morbius self-enrols in an experimental cure, combining his DNA with that of a vampire bat and so destining himself for a future as a living vampire.Symptoms of Morbius’s newfound condition are as follows: super-human speed, super-human strength, echolocation and, as he ultimately discovers, flight. Morbius, for all intents and Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, first, to Edward Gardner for mastering a rainbow programme of 21st century works in his first season as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Three Americans and a Berlin-based Brit, two women composers and two men, one of them a Pulitzer Prize-winning Afro-American who wrote the work in question in his nineties, all had the benefit of committed, clearly well-prepared performances, enthusiastically received by an ideally mixed audience.The concert kicked off a five-day Southbank Centre celebration of new and newish music from around the world, SoundState (though Read more ...